Archive for the ‘Different Flags’ Category

It is my heart. It is my soul, my best and truest soul. Every word, every sentence in it has my dreams, my hopes, my inner being. It is me. It is the person that I was. It is the naïve and believing young woman of years long gone. It is the young woman that life had not made hard and often bitter. My heart and soul are in an obscure novel, a published novel no one has ever heard of. Its title is Different Flags. The place and the two people that I loved and have never forgotten are in that book. They will always live even though they are no longer alive.

I cannot touch you. I cannot kiss you. I want to touch you. I want to kiss you. No matter how near you are, you are unreachable. There is a Stay Away invisible sign all around you. Your skin is forbidden to me. I dare not get close to it. It is too tempting. If I got close, I would get used to all of you. I would lose myself in passion.

You will never grow old. There will be no wrinkles on your face, nothing to tell the world how many years have gone by since the last time we saw each other. You were the one who taught me I had a soul, a mind and a body. I felt all three deeply and well because of you and only you. I loved you then. I loved you with so much heartbreak and joy. I love you now. You and I will be in our mid 20s forever. We will be young no matter what. There will be no pain; happiness will finally be ours.

I cannot forget it. I cannot forget you. All these years have gone by, countless years of deep hardship, but it doesn’t matter. You are in my heart. You were the one who taught me I was a woman. You were the man I dreamed of without realizing I was dreaming of you. I met you by accident; it wasn’t planned, but when I saw you, everything in me stood still. I couldn’t stop myself from loving you. That would have been the same as not being alive. I knew passion. The passion made me want to walk towards you.

I learned it. I repeated it over and over again. There was no way of getting enough of it. His name was like a drug I had to have or else I would explode. It was the only name that existed, that had ever existed. Walking down the street, going to buy groceries, watching TV somehow I would hear it and everything stopped. My body sensed an electric shock. I loved that man. I loved knowing he was near me, that I could see him anytime I wanted to. He belonged to me. He belonged to my heart.

Anything. I would do anything for you. Whatever you wanted, whatever you needed. No risk was too much of a challenge. Nothing mattered except making sure that you were happy. I could not have loved you more if I had tried. The first time I saw you, I knew. It was that simple. My heart was full and I couldn’t wait to race over to you. I had to see you no matter what.

This isn’t happening. It is not supposed to happen. You and I are standing by ourselves within 2 or 3 feet from one another. We don’t dare to get close. We feel, but we shouldn’t feel. I don’t dare walk to where you are. I could pretend that I need to ask you something, but if I do, my eyes would tell you things you don’t want to know. There is no one. You are the dream of my life. There is no other.

There we were, you and I. My knees were trembling. I made an effort to look at you, at your beautiful brown eyes. I had to do it. The words I wanted to say had to come out of my mouth. We were scared—you didn’t want to hear them and I was not going to let that stop me. My body stood before you. It was stiff. The words, I will never forget the words. They came out slowly, as if I had practiced them for hours. You said nothing; listening was all you could handle. My face was red. I swallowed hard. My patience was done with you. My legs walked me towards the door.

The body was like a shut door. The body was starting to feel but it didn’t want to. It resisted life, it resisted passion. The body resisted you. The voice coming out of the mouth was small. The voice didn’t want to say it—not out loud, not for everyone to hear. Acknowledging you meant acknowledging love. That was forbidden; it just wasn’t done in our world. Hiding was allowed. Having a secret that no one must know about was allowed as well. The secret was not well-kept. The eyes could not hide what the soul felt.

The name. It was his name. It was his name and his only. It belonged to no other man, living or dead. She had never been aware of it before she met him. Then she smiled in amazement and joy. It was an unusual name and it became like a drug. She would spell it over and over. She wanted to see it, to read it. There was nothing like it. It was like a foreign language that she had to learn.